The innate feature of the university
is that not only does it examine, it also produces power-laden and value-ridden
discourse. ...In any case, it becomes incumbent upon us as citizens/scholars
in the university to accept the consequences of our own value-redolent
roles. Like it or not, we are paradigms of our own values, advertisements
of our own ethics-especially noticeable when we presume to foster ethics-free,
value-lite education....What are we personally willing to sacrifice, give
up for the 'public good'? What gestures of reparations are we personally
willing to make? What risky, unfashionable research are we willing to undertake?

---Toni Morrison1

What I defend above all is the
possibility and the necessity of the critical intellectual....There is
no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical powers.

---Pierre Bourdieu2

1.1. Neoliberalism has become the
most dangerous ideology of the current historical moment. Not only does
it assault all things public, sabotage the basic contradiction between
democratic values and market fundamentalism, it also weakens any viable
notion of political agency by offering no language capable of connecting
private considerations to public issues. Market forces have altered
radically the language we use in both representing and evaluating human
behavior and action. One consequence is that civic discourse has given
way to the language of commercialism, privatization, and deregulation.
In addition, individual and social agency are defined largely through market-driven
notions of individualism, competition, and consumption. As such, the individual
choices we make as consumers become increasingly difficult to differentiate
from the "collective choices we make as citizens." 3
Under such circumstances, citizens lose their public voice as market liberties
replace civic freedoms and society increasingly depends on "consumers to
do the work of citizens." 4 Similarly, as corporate
culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political
society, there is a simultaneous diminishing of non-commodified public
spheres--those institutions engaged in dialogue, education, and learning--that
address the relationship of the self to public life, social responsibility
to the broader demands of citizenship, and provide a robust vehicle for
public participation and democratic citizenship. Without these critical
public spheres corporate power goes unchecked and politics becomes dull,
cynical, and oppressive. 5 But more importantly,
in the absence of such public spheres it becomes more difficult for citizens
to challenge the neoliberal myth that citizens are merely consumers and
that "wholly unregulated markets are the sole means by which we can produce
and distribute everything we care about, from durable goods to spiritual
values, from capital development to social justice, from profitability
to
sustainable environments, from private wealth to essential commonweal."
6
As democratic values give way to commercial values, intellectual ambitions
are often reduced to an instrument of the entrepreneurial self, and social
visions are dismissed as hopelessly out of date. Public space is
portrayed exclusively as an investment opportunity, and the public good
increasingly becomes a metaphor for public disorder. Within this discourse,
anyone who does not believe that rapacious capitalism is the only road
to freedom and the good life is dismissed as either a crank or worse.

1.2. Within this market-driven
discourse, corporate culture becomes both the model for the good life and
the paradigmatic sphere for defining individual success and fulfillment.
I use the term corporate culture to refer to an ensemble of ideological
and institutional forces that functions politically and pedagogically to
both govern organizational life through senior managerial control and to
produce compliant workers, depoliticized consumers, and passive citizens.
7 Within the language and images of corporate
culture, citizenship is portrayed as an utterly privatized affair whose
aim is to produce competitive self-interested individuals vying for their
own material and ideological gain. 8 Reformulating
social issues as strictly individual or economic issues, corporate culture
functions largely to cancel out the democratic impulses and practices of
civil society by either devaluing them or absorbing such impulses within
a market logic. No longer a space for political struggle, culture in the
corporate model becomes an all-encompassing horizon for producing market
identities, values, and practices. The good life, in this discourse, "is
construed in terms of our identities as consumers--we are what we buy."
9 Public spheres are replaced by commercial spheres
as the substance of critical democracy is emptied out and replaced by a
democracy of goods, consumer life styles, shopping malls, and the increasing
expansion of the cultural and political power of corporations throughout
the world.

1.3. Accountable only to the bottom-line
of profitability, corporate culture and its growing influence in American
life has signaled a radical shift in both the notion of public culture
and what constitutes the meaning of citizenship and the defense of the
public good. For example, the rapid resurgence of corporate power in the
last twenty years and the attendant reorientation of culture to the demands
of commerce and regulation have substituted the language of personal responsibility
and private initiative for the discourses of social responsibility and
public service. This can be seen in government policies designed to dismantle
state protections for the poor, the environment, working people, and people
of color. 10 For example, the 1996 welfare law signed
by President Clinton reduces food stamp assistance for millions of children
in working families and a study enacted shortly afterwards by the Urban
Institute showed that the bill would "move 2.6 million people, including
1.1 million children into poverty." 11 Other
examples include President Bush's passing of a punitive wlfare reform bill
that requires poor, young mothers to work a forty-hour week, without the
benefit of funds for child care as well as the passing of a 2002 budget
in which forty times more money went for tax cuts to the wealthy than for
education.

1.4. As a result of the corporate take-over
of public life, the maintenance of democratic public spheres from which
to organize the energies of a moral vision loses all relevance. As the
power of the state and civil society are reduced in their ability to impose
or make corporate power accountable, politics as an expression of democratic
struggle is deflated, and it becomes more difficult within the logic of
self-help and the bottom-line to address pressing social and moral issues
in systemic and political terms. This suggests a dangerous turn in American
society, one that both threatens our understanding of democracy as fundamental
to our freedom and the ways in which we address the meaning and purpose
of public and higher education.

1.5. History has been clear about the
dangers of unbridled corporate power. 12 The
brutal practices of slavery, the exploitation of child labor, the sanctioning
of the cruelest working conditions in the mines and sweat shops of America
and abroad, and the destruction of the environment have all been fueled
by the law of maximizing profits and minimizing costs, especially when
there has been no countervailing power from civil society to hold such
powers in check. This is not to suggest that capitalism is the enemy of
democracy, but that in the absence of vibrant public spheres and the imperatives
of a strong democracy, the power of corporate culture when left on
its own appears to respect few boundaries based on self-restraint and those
non-commodified, broader human values that are central to a democratic
civic culture. John Dewey was right in arguing that democracy requires
work, but that work is not synonymous with democracy. 13

1.6. Struggling for democracy is both
a political and educational task. Fundamental to the rise of a vibrant
democratic culture is the recognition that education must be treated as
a public good--as a crucial site where students gain a public voice and
come to grips with their own power as individual and social agents. Public
and higher education cannot be viewed merely as sites for commercial investment
or for affirming a notion of the private good based exclusively on the
fulfillment of individual needs. Reducing higher education to the handmaiden
of corporate culture works against the critical social imperative of educating
citizens who can sustain and develop inclusive democratic public spheres.
There is a long tradition extending from Thomas Jefferson to C. Wright
Mills that extols the importance of education as essential for a democratic
public life. This legacy of public discourse appears to have faded as the
American university reinvents itself by giving way to the demands of the
marketplace. In the age of money and profit, academic disciplines gain
stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market,
and students now rush to take courses and receive professional credentials
that provide them with the cache they need to sell themselves to the highest
bidder. As the line between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions
of higher education collapse, John Palattela observes that many "schools
now serve as personal offices for corporations."14
Educational consultants all over America now call upon educational institutions
to "advise their clients in the name of efficiency to act like corporations
selling products and seek 'market niches' to save themselves," and meet
the challenges of the new world order.15 Within
this corporatized discourse, management models of decision-making align
human initiative and learning with business interests, making issues of
social responsibility and public accountability irrelevant as the goals
of higher education are increasingly fashioned in the language of debits
and credits, cost analyses, and the bottom line. 16
Not surprisingly, students are now referred to as "customers" and "consumers,"
while faculty are now defined less through their scholarship than through
their ability to secure funds and grants from foundations,
corporations, and other external sources. Instead of concentrating
on critical teaching and research aimed at the public good, faculty are
now urged to focus in on corporate largesse. Rather than being esteemed
as engaged teachers and rigorous researchers, faculty are now valued as
multinational operatives and increasingly reduced to contract employees.
17

1.7. In what follows, I want to address
the fundamental shift in society regarding how we think about the relationship
between corporate culture and democracy. 18
Specifically, I want to argue that one of the most important indications
of such a change can be seen in the ways in which we are currently being
asked to rethink the role of higher education. Underlying this analysis
is the assumption that the struggle to reclaim higher education must be
seen as part of a broader battle over the defense of public goods, and
that at the heart of such a struggle is the need to challenge the ever
growing discourse and influence of neoliberalism, corporate power, and
corporate politics. I will conclude by offering some suggestions
as to what educators can do to reassert the primacy of higher education
as an essential sphere for expanding and deepening the processes of democracy
and civil society.

Incorporating Higher Education

2.1. The current debate over the reform
of higher education appears indifferent both to the historic function of
American universities and to the broader ideological, economic, and political
issues that have shaped it. Against the encroaching demands of a market
driven logic, a number of educators have argued forcefully that higher
education should be defended as both a public good and as an autonomous
sphere for the development of a critical and productive democratic citizenry.
19
Higher education, for many educators, represents a central site for keeping
alive the tension between market values and those values representative
of civil society that cannot be measured in narrow commercial terms but
are crucial to a substantive democracy. Central to this discourse is the
recognition that education must not be confused with training, suggesting
all the more that educators resist allowing commercial values to shape
the purpose and mission of higher education. Richard Hoftstadter understood
the threat that corporate values posed to education and once argued that
the best reason for supporting higher education "lies not in the services
they perform....but in the values they represent." 20
For Hoftstadter it was the values of justice, freedom, equality, and the
rights of citizens as equal and free human beings that were at the heart
of what it meant for higher education to fulfill its role in educating
students for the demands of leadership, social citizenship, and democratic
public life.

2.2. The ascendancy of corporate culture
in all facets of American life has tended to uproot the legacy of democratic
concerns and rights that has historically defined the stated mission of
higher education. 21 Moreover, the growing influence
of corporate culture on university life in the United States has served
to largely undermine the distinction between higher education and business
that educators such as Hoftstadter wanted to preserve. As universities
become increasingly strapped for money, corporations are more than willing
to provide the needed resources, but the costs are troubling and come with
strings attached. Corporations increasingly dictate the very research
they sponsor and in some universities such as the University of California
at Berkeley, business representatives are actually appointed to sit
on faculty committees that determine how research funds are to be spent
and allocated. Equally disturbing is the emergence of a number of academics
who either hold stocks or other financial incentives in the very companies
sponsoring their research. As the boundaries between public values
and commercial interests become blurred, many academics appear less as
disinterested truth seekers than as operatives for corporate interests.
But there is more at stake than academics selling out to the highest corporate
bidder. In some cases, academic research is compromised and corporations
routinely censor research results that are at odds with their commercial
interests. For instance, Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn reported
in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly that "In a 1996 study
published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 98 percent
of papers based on industry-sponsored research reflected favorably on the
drugs being examined, as compared with 79 percent of papers based on research
not funded by the industry." 22 Press and Washburn
also provide examples of companies that have censored corporate sponsored
research papers by removing passages that highlighted unfavorable results
or negative outcomes. It gets worse. As large amounts of corporate capital
flow into the universities, those areas of study in the university that
don't translate into substantial profits get either marginalized, underfunded
or eliminated. Hence, we are witnessing both a downsizing in the humanities
as well as the increasing refusal on the part of universities to fund research
in areas of public health or science which place a high priority on public
service, areas largely inhabited by people who can't pay for such services.
The new corporate university appears to be indifferent to ideas,
forms of learning, and modes of research that do not have any commercial
value.

2.3. In the name of efficiency, educational
consultants all over America advise their clients to act like corporations
selling products and seek 'market niches' to save themselves. Within this
corporatized regime management models of decision-making replace faculty
governance. Once constrained by the concept of "shared" governance in the
past decade administrations have taken more power and reduced faculty-controlled
governance institutions to advisory status. Given the narrow nature of
corporate concerns, it is not surprising that when matters of accountability
become part of the language of school reform, they are divorced from broader
considerations of social responsibility. As corporate culture and values
shape university life, corporate planning replaces social planning, management
becomes a substitute for leadership, and the private domain of individual
achievement replaces the discourse of public politics and social responsibility.
As the power of higher education is reduced in its ability to make corporate
power accountable, it becomes more difficult within the logic of
the bottom-line for faculty, students, and administrators to address pressing
social and ethical issues. 23 This suggests
a dangerous turn in American society, one that threatens both our understanding
of democracy as fundamental to our basic rights and freedoms, and the ways
in which we can rethink and re-appropriate the meaning and purpose of higher
education.

Education and the Rise of the Corporate
Manager

3.1. Katherine S. Mangan reported not
too long ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education that there are
a growing number of presidential searches "looking for leaders who can
bridge business and academe." 24 According to
Mangan, this has resulted in a large number of business-school deans being
offered jobs as college or university presidents. The rationale for such
actions appears to be that "Business deans are often in a strong position
to cultivate corporate contacts....[and are] better at translating the
academic environment to the outside world." 25 Mangan's
article makes clear that what was once part of the hidden curriculum of
higher education--the creeping vocationalization and subordination of learning
to the dictates of the market--has become an open and defining principle
of education at all levels of learning.

3.2. According to Stanley Aronowitz,
many colleges and universities are experiencing financial hard times brought
on by the end of the cold war and the dwindling of government financed
defense projects coupled with a sharp reduction of state aid to higher
education. As a result, they are all too happy to allow corporate leaders
to run their institutions, form business partnerships, establish cushy
relationships with business oriented legislators, and develop curricula
programs tailored to the needs of corporate interests. 26
Stories predominate in the national press about the changing face of leadership
in higher education as more and more schools turn away from hiring scholars
to fill administrative positions and rely instead on business leaders who
can assume the role of innovative budget cutters. One example includes
the hiring of John A. Fry, a former business consultant who never worked
for a university, as an executive vice president at the University of Pennsylvania.
According to one report, Fry "embodies the new, corporatized Penn: tactical,
innovative, not tied to tradition, and with an ever-sharp pencil." 27
Fry has instituted reviews of all services at Penn in order to determine
which ones can be outsourced to the private sector. Thus far, he has saved
the university over $50 million dollars while eliminating over 500 jobs,
many of them among employees who have been with the University of Pennsylvania
for decades. Fry's response to the plight of such workers is instructive.
He claims that under his corporatized model, with its threat to traditional
forms of job security, employees are now more efficient. He claims "They
are taking less for granted in terms of their employment status....I feel
we do the institution a disservice if we all allow inefficiency to perpetuate
because we don't want to rock the boat, or we don't want to deprive these
poor people who have been working here for five decades from their jobs.
I don't consider it cold-hearted, I consider it an absolute responsibility."
28
Fry frames the issue of responsibility exclusively with the logic of the
market and, as one University of Penn faculty member put it, he seems entirely
indifferent to the traditional role of higher education as a "humanizing
force in society, where the value of people is always a priority." 29
The effect of the new leadership at Penn is disheartening. Elsa R. Ramsden,
the chairman of the Penn chapter of the American Association of University
Professors, reports that many faculty are disheartened by the new leadership,
and they have retreated to their classrooms, unwilling to get involved
in the political process because they fear losing their jobs, not getting
tenure, or having their salaries frozen. Fry's single-minded devotion
to management driven efficiency appears to legitimate such fears. According
to Fry, "I tend to be very impatient. Sometimes that serves us well, sometimes
not. I have a foot-on-the-gas mentality. I don't always want to listen
to reasons. I just want to get results." 30 Fry's
vocabulary reveals the exhaustion of critical thought as a defining feature
of corporate culture, especially as it is applied to public spheres that
serve a broader conception of public service and citizenship. The notion
that higher education should be defended as centers of critical scholarship,
social responsibility, and enlightened teaching in order to expand the
scope of freedom and democracy appears irrelevant if not dangerous in this
discourse.

3.3. The vocationalizing of the university
has many consequences. In some cases, it has meant that universities
such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of
California at Irvine have cut deals with corporations by offering to do
product research and cede to their corporate backers the patents for such
inventions and discoveries in return for ample research money. Further
evidence of the vocationalization of higher education can be found in the
increasing willingness on the part of legislators, government representatives,
and school officials to rely on corporate leaders to establish the terms
of the debate in the media regarding the meaning and purpose of higher
education. Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Warren Buffet, and other members
of the Fortune 500 "club" are now viewed as educational prophets. 31
And, yet, the only qualifications they seem to have is that they have been
successful in accumulating huge amounts of profits for themselves and their
shareholders, while at the same time laying off thousands of workers in
order to cut costs and raise profits. While Gates, Milken, and others
couch their concerns about education in the rhetoric of public service,
corporate organizations such as the Committee for Economic Development,
an organization of about 250 corporations, have been more blunt about their
interest in education. Not only has the group argued that social goals
and services get in the way of learning basic skills, but that many employers
in the business community feel dissatisfied because "a large majority of
their new hires lack adequate writing and problem-solving skills."32

3.4. Given the narrow nature of corporate
concerns, it is not surprising that when matters of accountability become
part of the language of school reform, they are divorced from broader considerations
of ethics, equity, and justice. This type of corporate discourse
not only lacks a vision beyond its own pragmatic interests, it also lacks
a self-critical inventory about its own ideology and its effects on society.
But, of course, one would not expect such concerns to emerge within corporations
where questions of consequence begin and end with the bottom line. Questions
about the effects of downsizing, deindustrialization, and the "trend toward
more low-paid, temporary, benefit-free, blue- and white-collar jobs and
fewer decent permanent factory and office jobs"33
caused by the reforms implemented by companies such as IBM must come from
those democratic arenas that business seeks to 'restructure'. Mega-corporations
will say nothing about their profound role in promoting the flight
of capital abroad, the widening gap between intellectual, technical, and
manual labor and the growing class of permanently underemployed in a mass
of 'deskilled' jobs, the growing inequality between the rich and the poor,
or the scandalous use of child labor in third world countries. The onus
of responsibility is placed on educated citizens to recognize that corporate
principles of efficiency, accountability, and profit maximization have
not created new jobs but in most cases have eliminated them. 34
My point, of course, is that such absences in public discourse constitute
a defining principal of corporate ideology, which refuses to address--and
must be made to address--the scarcity of moral vision that inspires such
calls for school reform modeled after corporate reforms implemented in
the last decade.

3.5. But the modeling of higher education
after corporate principles and the partnerships they create with the business
community do more than reorient the purpose and meaning of higher education,
such reforms also instrumentalize the curricula and narrow what it means
to extend knowledge to broader social concerns. Business-university
partnerships provide just one concrete example of the willingness of both
educators and corporate executives to acknowledge the effects such mergers
have on the production and dissemination of knowledge in the interest of
the public good. Lost in the willingness of schools such as MIT to sell
part of their curricula to the corporations is the ethical consequence
of ignoring basic science research that benefits humanity as a whole because
such research offers little as a profit maximizing venture. Ralph Nader
indicated a few years ago in a nationally broadcast speech on C-Span that
one result of such transactions is that the universities are doing far
too little to develop anti-malaria and tuberculosis vaccines at a time
when these diseases are once again killing large numbers of people in third
world countries; such interventions are viewed as non-profitable investments.
35
Research guided only by the controlling yardstick of profit undermines
the role of the university as a public sphere dedicated to addressing the
most serious social problems a society faces. Moreover, the corporate model
of research instrumentalizes knowledge and undermines forms of theorizing,
pedagogy, and meaning that define higher education as a public good rather
than as a private good.

3.6. Missing from much of the corporate
discourse on schooling is any analysis of how power works in shaping knowledge,
how the teaching of broader social values provide safeguards against turning
citizen skills into simply training skills for the work place, or how schooling
can help students reconcile the seemingly opposing needs of freedom and
solidarity in order to forge a new conception of civic courage and democratic
public life. Knowledge as capital in the corporate model is privileged
as a form of investment in the economy, but appears to have little value
when linked to the power of self-definition, social responsibility, or
the capacities of individuals to expand the scope of freedom, justice,
and the operations of democracy. 36 Knowledge stripped
of ethical and political considerations offers limited, if any, insights
into how schools should educate students to push against the oppressive
boundaries of gender, class, race, and age domination. Nor does such a
language provide the pedagogical conditions for students to critically
engage knowledge as an ideology deeply implicated in issues and struggles
concerning the production of identities, culture, power, and history. Education
is a moral and political practice and always presupposes an introduction
to and preparation for particular forms of social life, a particular rendering
of what community is, and what the future might hold.

3.7. If pedagogy is, in part, about
the production of identities then curricula modeled after corporate culture
have been enormously successful in preparing students for low skilled,
service work in a society that has little to offer in the way of meaningful
employment for the vast majority of its graduates. If CEO's are going
to provide some insight into how education should be reformed, they will
have to reverse their tendency to collapse the boundaries between corporate
culture and civic culture, between a society that defines itself through
the interests of corporate power and one that defines itself through more
democratic considerations regarding what constitutes substantive citizenship
and social responsibility. Moreover, they will have to recognize that the
problems with American schools cannot be reduced to matters of accountability
or cost-effectiveness. Nor can the solution to such problems be reduced
to the spheres of management and economics. The problems of higher education
must be addressed in the realms of values and politics, while engaging
critically the most fundamental beliefs Americans have as a nation regarding
the meaning and purpose of education and its relationship to democracy.

Corporate Culture's Threat to Faculty
and Students

4.1. As universities increasingly model
themselves after corporations, it becomes crucial to understand how the
principles of corporate culture intersect with the meaning and purpose
of the university, the role of knowledge production for the twenty-first
century, and the social practices inscribed within teacher-student relationships.
The signs are not encouraging.

4.2. In many ways, the cost accounting
principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control of
the corporate order have restructured the meaning and purpose of education.
As I have mentioned previously, many university presidents are now given
the title of CEO, academic programs are streamlined to cut costs, and in
many colleges new presidents are actively pursuing ways to establish closer
ties between their respective colleges and the business community. For
example, The New York Times reports, in what has become a typical
story, that at George Mason University, a business oriented president has
emphasized technology training in order to "boost the university's financing
(by the state legislature) by as much as $25 million a year, provided that
George Mason cultivates stronger ties with northern Virginia's booming
technology industry." 37 In other quarters of higher
education, the results of the emergence of the corporate university appear
even more ominous. James Carlin, a multimillionaire and successful insurance
executive who until recently served as the Chairman of the Massachusetts
State Board of Education, gave a speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of
Commerce. In a statement that belies his ignorance of the recent history
and critical mission of higher education, Carlin argued that colleges need
to be downsized just as businesses have in the past decade, tenure should
be abolished, and faculty have too much power in shaping decisions in the
university. Carlin's conclusion: "At least 50 percent of all non-hard sciences
research on American campuses is a lot of foolishness" and should be banned.38
Pointing to the rising costs of higher education, he further predicted
that "there's going to be a revolution in higher education. Whether you
like it or not, it's going to be broken apart and put back together differently.
It won't be the same. Why should it be? Why should everything change except
for higher education?" 39 Carlin's "revolution" has
been spelled out in his call for increasing the work load of professors
to four three- credit courses a semester, effectively reducing the time
such educators might have in doing research or shaping institutional power.

4.3. There is more at stake in university
reform than the realities and harsh principles of cost cutting. Corporate
culture in its reincarnation in the 1980s and 1990s appears to have little
patience with non-commodified knowledge or with the more lofty ideals that
have defined higher education as a public service. Carlin's anti-intellectualism
and animosity toward educators and students alike signal that as higher
education comes under the influence of corporate ideologies, universities
will be largely refashioned in the image of the new multi-conglomerate
landscape. One consequence will be an attempt to curtail academic freedom
and tenure. As one business oriented administrator admitted in a conversation
about tenure to Bill Tierney, "We have to focus on the priorities of the...school
and not the individual. We must industrialize the school, and tenure--academic
freedom--isn't part of that model." 40 Missing
from this model of leadership is the recognition that academic freedom
implies that knowledge has a critical function, that intellectual inquiry
that is unpopular and critical should be safeguarded and treated as an
important social asset, and that public intellectuals are more than merely
functionaries of the corporate order. Such ideals are at odds with the
vocational function that corporate culture wants to assign to higher education.

4.4. While the appeal to downsizing
higher education appears to have caught the public's imagination at the
moment, it belies the fact that such "reorganization" has been going on
for some time. In fact, more professors are working part-time and at two-year
community colleges than at any other time in the country's recent history.
A report recently put out by the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty
recently pointed out that "in 1998-1999, less than one-third of all faculty
members were tenured....[and that] in 1992-1993, 40 percent of the faculty
was classified as part-time and in 1998-99, the share had risen to 45 percent."41
Creating a permanent underclass of part-time professional workers in higher
education is not only demoralizing and exploitative for many faculty who
inhabit such jobs, but such policies increasingly deskill both partial
and full-time faculty by increasing the amount of work they have to do,
while simultaneously shifting power away from the faculty to the managerial
sectors of the university.

4.5. The turn to downsizing and deskilling
faculty is also exacerbated by the attempts on the part of many universities
to expand into the profitable market of distance education. Such a market
is all the more lucrative since it is being underwritten by the combined
armed services, which in August of 2000 pledged almost $1 billion to "provide
taxpayer-subsidized university- based distance education for active-duty
personnel and their families." 42 David Noble
has written extensively on the restructuring of higher education under
the imperatives of the new digital technologies and the move into distance
education and the news is not good. According to Noble, on-line learning
largely functions through pedagogical models and methods of delivery that
not only rely on standardized, pre-packaged curriculum and methodological
efficiency, they also reinforce the commercial penchant towards training
and deprofessionalization. The marriage of corporate culture, higher
education, and the new high-speed technologies also offers universities
big opportunities to cut back on maintenance costs, eliminate entire buildings
such as libraries and classrooms, and gain further control over what educators
teach by appropriating property rights to courses for a small fee, while
removing faculty members from any control over how their courses might
be used. With the deskilling of the professoriate there will be a
rise in the use of part-time faculty, who will be "perfectly suited to
the investor-imagined university of the future." 43
Reporting on the coming restructuring of the university around online and
distance education, The Chronicle of Higher Education claims that
this new type of education will produce a new breed of faculty, "who hails
not from academia but from the corporate world." Hired more for their "business
savvy than their degree, a focus on the bottom line is normal; tenure isn't."
This alleged celebration of faculty as social entrepreneurs appears to
offer no apologies for turning education into a commercial enterprise and
teaching into a sales pitch
for profits. As one enthusiastic distance educator
put it for the Chronicle, "I love not only the teaching but the
selling of it." 44

4.6. Held up to the profit standard,
universities and colleges will increasingly calibrate supply to demand,
and the results look ominous with regard to what forms of knowledge, pedagogy,
and research will be rewarded and legitimated. In addition, it appears
that populations marked by class and racial subordination will have less
access to higher education. As globalization and corporate mergers increase,
technologies develop, and cost effective practices expand, there will be
fewer jobs for certain professionals resulting in the inevitable elevation
of admission standards, restriction of student loans, and the reduction
of student access to higher education. Stanley Aronowitz argues that the
changing nature of intellectual labor, knowledge production, and the emerging
glut of professionals on a global scale undermine mass education as the
answer to the growing underemployment of the professional classes. He writes:

Although the media hypes that millions
of new jobs require specialized, advanced knowledge and credentials, the
bare truth is that technological change, globalization, and relatively
slow growth have reduced the demand for certain professionals....And despite
the boom of the middle 1990s, chronic shortages of physicians, accountants
and attorneys have all but disappeared. In fact, the globalization of intellectual
labor is beginning to affect knowledge industries, with Indian and Chinese
engineers and computer designers performing work that was once almost exclusively
done in North America and western Europe. And do nonscientists really need
credentials signifying they have completed a prescribed program to perform
most intellectual labor? If jobs are the intended outcome of a credential,
there are few arguments for mass higher education. 45

Fewer jobs in higher education means fewer students
will be enrolled or have access, but it also means that the processes of
vocationalization--fueled by corporate values that mimic "flexibility,"
"competition," or "lean production" and rationalized through the application
of accounting principles--poses the threat of gutting many academic departments
and programs that cannot translate their subject matter into commercial
gains. Programs and courses that focus on areas such as critical theory,
literature, feminism, ethics, environmentalism, post-colonialism,
philosophy, and sociology suggest an intellectual cosmopolitanism or a
concern with social issues that will be either eliminated or technicized
because their role in the market will be judged as ornamental. Similarly,
those working conditions that allow professors and graduate assistants
to comment extensively on student work, provide small seminars for classes,
spend time with student advising, conduct independent studies, and do collaborative
research with both faculty colleagues and students do not appear consistent
with the imperatives of downsizing, efficiency, and cost-accounting. 46
Students will also bear the burden of privatization as higher education
joins hands with the corporate banking world. Lacking adequate financial
aid, students, especially poor students, will increasingly finance the
high costs of their education through private corporations such as Citibank,
Chase Manhattan, Marine Midland, and other sanctioned lenders. Given
the huge debt such students accumulate, it is reasonable to assume, as
Jeff Williams points out, such loans will "effectively indenture students
for ten to twenty years after graduation and intractably reduce their career
choices, funneling them into the corporate workforce in order to pay their
loans." 47 Of course, for many young people
marginalized by class and color, the potential costs of higher education
will dissuade them from it regardless of its status or availability.

Higher Education as a Democratic Public
Sphere

5.1. I want to return to an issue I
had raised in the beginning of this article in which I argued that corporations
have been given too much power in this society, and hence the need for
educators and others to address the threat this poses to all facets of
public life organized around the non-commodified principles of justice,
freedom, and equality. Against the current onslaught to vocationalize higher
education, educators need to defend higher education as a resource vital
to the democratic and civic life of the nation. Central to such a task
is the challenge to resist what Bill Readings has called a consumer-oriented
corporation more concerned about accounting than accountability. 48
The crisis of higher education needs to be analyzed in terms of wider configurations
of economic, political, and social forces that exacerbate tensions between
those who value such institutions as public goods and those advocates of
neoliberalism who see market culture as a master design for all human affairs.
Educators must challenge all attempts on the part of conservatives and
liberals to either define democracy exclusively as a liability or to enervate
its substantive ideals by reducing it to the imperatives of hyper-capitalism
and the glorification of financial markets. Moreover, as Jeff Williams
points out, educators must

distinguish the university as a not-for
profit institution, which serves a public interest, from for-profit organizations,
which by definition serve private interests and often conflict with public
interests.... [while at the same time proposing] new images or fictions
of the university, to reclaim the ground of the public interest, and to
promote a higher education operating in that public interest. 49

Challenging the encroachment of corporate power
is essential if democracy is to remain a defining principle of education
and everyday life. Part of such a challenge necessitates that educators
and others create organizations capable of mobilizing civic dialogue, provide
an alternative conception of the meaning and purpose of higher education,
and develop political organizations that can influence legislation to challenge
corporate power's ascendancy over the institutions and mechanisms of civil
society. Such a project suggests that educators, students, and others will
have to provide the rationale and mobilize the possibility for creating
enclaves of resistance, new public cultures for collective development,
and institutional spaces that highlight, nourish, and evaluate the tension
between civil society and corporate power while simultaneously struggling
to prioritize citizen rights over consumer rights.

5.2. In strategic terms, revitalizing
public dialogue suggests that educators need to take seriously the importance
of defending higher education as an institution of civic culture whose
purpose is to educate students for active and critical citizenship. 50
Situated within a broader context of issues concerned with social responsibility,
politics, and the dignity of human life, higher education should be defended
as a site that offers students the opportunity to involve themselves in
the deepest problems of society, to acquire the knowledge, skills, and
ethical vocabulary necessary for what Vaclav Havel calls "the richest possible
participation in public life." 51 This points to defending
higher education as a democratic public sphere whose purpose is to help
students to come to terms with their own sense of power and public voice
as individual and social agents by enabling them to examine and frame critically
what they learn in the classroom "within a more political or social or
intellectual understanding of what's going on" in the interface between
their lives and the world at large. 52

5.3. But such protests cannot be limited
to either the sphere of higher educators or to faculty and students.
Educators, parents, legislators, students, and social activists from a
variety of sites need to come together to defend institutions of higher
education as indispensable to the life of the nation because they are one
of the few public spaces left where students can learn the power of and
engage in the experience of democracy. In the face of corporate takeovers,
the ongoing commodification of the curriculum, and the transformation of
students into consumers, such a project requires that educators mount
a collective struggle to reassert the crucial importance of higher education
in offering students the skills they need for learning how to govern and
take risks, while developing the knowledge necessary for deliberation,
reasoned arguments, and social action. At issue here is providing students
with an education that allows them to recognize the dream and promise of
a substantive democracy, particularly the idea that as citizens they are
"entitled to public services, decent housing, safety, security, support
during hard times, and most importantly, some power over decision making."53

5.4. But more is needed than defending
higher education as a vital sphere in which to develop and nourish the
proper balance between democratic values and market fundamentalism, between
identities founded on democratic principles and identities steeped in forms
of competitive, self-interested individualism that celebrate their own
material and ideological advantages. Given the current assault on critical
educators in light of the tragic events of September 11th, it is politically
crucial that educators at all levels of involvement in the academy be defended
as public intellectuals who provide an indispensable service to the nation.
Such an appeal cannot be made in the name of professionalism but in terms
of the civic duty such intellectuals provide. Too many academics
have retreated into narrow specialisms that serve largely to consolidate
authority rather than critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on
controversial issues or to examine the role of intellectuals in lessening
human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and
unfortunate examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public
life. On the other hand, many left and liberal academics have retreated
into arcane discourses that offer them mostly the safe ground of the professional
recluse. Making almost no connections to audiences outside of the academy
or to the issues that bear on their lives, such academics have become largely
irrelevant. This is not to suggest that they do not publish or speak at
symposiums but that they often do so to very limited audiences and in a
language that is often overly abstract, highly aestheticized, rarely takes
an overt political position, and seems largely indifferent to broader public
issues. Engaged intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Edward
Said and Pierre Bourdieu suggest a different and more committed role for
academics. They suggest that academics should engage in ongoing
forms of permanent critique of all abuses of power or authority, "to enter
into sustained and vigorous exchange with the outside world," as part of
a larger project of helping "to create the social conditions for the collective
production of realist utopias." 54 Following Bourdieu
and others, I believe that intellectuals who inhabit our nation's universities
should represent the conscience of a society not only because they shape
the conditions under which future generations learn about themselves and
their relations to others and the outside world, but also because they
engage pedagogical practices that are by their very nature moral and political,
rather than simply technical. And at its best, such pedagogy bears witness
to the ethical and political dilemmas that animate the broader social landscape.
Such pedagogical approaches are important because they provide spaces that
are both comforting and unsettling, spaces that both disturb and
enlighten. Pedagogy in this instance not only works to shift how students
think about the issues affecting their lives and the world at large, but
potentially energizes them to seize such moments as possibilities for acting
on the world, engaging it as a matter of politics, power, and social justice.
The appeal here is not merely ethical, it is also an appeal that addresses
the materiality of resources, access, and politics, while viewing power
as generative and crucial to any viable notion of individual and social
agency.

5.5. Organizing against the corporate
takeover of higher education also suggests fighting to protect the jobs
of full-time faculty, turning adjunct jobs into full-time positions, expanding
benefits to part-time workers, and putting power into the hands of faculty
and students. Moreover, such a struggle must address the exploitative conditions
many graduate students work under, constituting a de facto army of service
workers who are underpaid, overworked, and shorn of any real power or benefits.55
Similarly, programs in many universities that offer remedial programs,
affirmative action, and other crucial pedagogical resources are under massive
assault, often by conservative trustees who want to eliminate from the
university any attempt to address the deep inequities in the society, while
simultaneously denying a decent education to minorities of color and class.
Hence, both teachers and students increasingly bear the burden of overcrowded
classes, limited resources, and hostile legislators. Such educators and
students need to join with community people, and social movements around
a common platform that resists the corporatizing of schools, the roll back
in basic services, and the exploitation of teaching assistants and adjunct
faculty.

5.6. In the face of the growing corporatization
of schools, educators should organize to establish a bill of rights identifying
and outlining the range of non-commercial relations that can be used to
mediate between the higher education and the business world. If the forces
of corporate culture are to be challenged, progressive educators must also
enlist the help of diverse communities, local and federal government, and
other political forces to ensure that public institutions of higher learning
are adequately funded so that they will not have to rely on corporate sponsorship
and advertising revenues. How our colleges and universities educate youth
for the future will determine the meaning and substance of democracy itself.
Such a responsibility necessitates prioritizing democratic community, citizen
rights, and the public good over market relations, narrow consumer demands,
and corporate interests.

5.7. The corporatizing of United States
education reflects a crisis of vision regarding the meaning and purpose
of democracy at a time when "market cultures, market moralities, market
mentalities [are] shattering community, eroding civic society, [and] undermining
the nurturing system for children." 56 Yet such a
crisis also represents a unique opportunity for educators to expand and
deepen the meaning of democracy--radically defined as a struggle to combine
the distribution of wealth, income, and knowledge with a recognition and
positive valorizing of cultural diversity--by reasserting the primacy of
politics, power, and struggle as a pedagogical task. 57
Jacques Derrida has suggested in another context that the social function
of intellectuals as well as any viable notion of education should be grounded
in a vibrant politics, which makes the promise of democracy a matter of
concrete urgency. For Derrida, making visible a "democracy" which is to
come as opposed to that which presents itself in its name provides a referent
for both criticizing everywhere what parades as democracy--"the current
state of all so-called democracy"58--and critically
assessing the conditions and possibilities for democratic transformation.
Derrida sees the promise of democracy as the proper articulation of a political
ethics and by implication suggests that when higher education is engaged
and articulated through the project of democratic social transformation
it can function as a vital public sphere for critical learning, ethical
deliberation, and civic engagement. Under such circumstances, the meaning
and purpose of higher education redefines the relationship between knowledge
and power, on the one hand, and learning and social change on the other.
In doing so, higher education represents the possibility of retaining one
important democratic public sphere that offers the conditions for resisting
the increasing depoliticization of the citizenry, provides a language to
challenge the politics of accommodation that connects education to the
logic of privatization, refuses to define students as simply consuming
subjects, and actively opposes the view of teaching as market-driven practice
and learning as a form of training. At stake is not simply the future of
higher education, but the nature of critical democracy itself. Toni
Morrison understands something about the fragile nature of the relationship
between higher education and democratic public life and she rightly suggests
given the urgency of the times the necessity for all members of academia
to rethink the meaning and purpose of higher education. She writes:

If the university does not take seriously
and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator
of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of
deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes
will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us. 59

5.8. Both Derrida and Morrison recognize
that the present crisis represents a historical opportunity to refuse the
commonsense assumption that democracy is synonymous with capitalism
and critical citizenship is limited to being a literate consumer. It is
in the spirit of such a critique and act of resistance that educators need
to break with the "new faith in the historical inevitability professed
by the theorists of [neo]liberalism [in order] to invent new forms of collective
political work capable of" confronting the march of corporate power. 60
This will not be an easy task, but it is a necessary one if democracy is
to be won back from the reign of financial markets and the Darwinian values
of an unbridled capitalism. Academics can contribute to such a struggle
by, among other things, defending higher education for the contribution
it makes to the quality of public life, fighting for the crucial role it
plays pedagogically in asserting the primacy of democratic values over
commercial interests, and struggling collectively to preserve its political
responsibility in providing students with the capacities they need for
civic courage and engaged critical citizenship.

4. These ideas are taken from Benjamin R.
Barber, "Blood Brothers, Consumers, or Citizens? Three Models of Identity-Ethnic,
Commercial, and Civic," in Carol Gould and Pasquale Pasquino, eds. Cultural
Identity and the Nation State (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001),
p. 65.

5. I address this issue in Henry A. Giroux,
Public
Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2001).

7. The classic dominant texts on corporate
culture are Terrance Deal and Alan Kennedy, Corporate Culture: The Rites
and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982) and
Thomas Peterson and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New
York: Harper and Row, 1982). I also want to point out that corporate culture
is a dynamic, ever changing force. But in spite of its innovations and
changes, it rarely if ever challenges the centrality of the profit motive,
or fails to prioritize commercial considerations over a set of values that
would call the class based system of capitalism into question. For a brilliant
discussion of the changing nature of corporate culture in light of the
cultural revolution of the 1960s, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of
Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

8. Gary Becker captures this sentiment in
his book, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. He argues "we
not only ought to think and act as self-interested agents, but we are already
acting (if not yet thinking) in precisely those ways. We are each of us
self-interested calculators of our own advantage, however much we might
wish to hide that fact from others and even (or perhaps especially) from
ourselves." Cited in Terrance Ball, Ibid., p. 78.

16. For a critically insightful set of commentaries
on the politics of work in higher education, see Randy Martin, ed. Chalk
Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999).

17. The percentage of part-time faculty in
higher education continues to grow from 33% in 1987 to 43% in 1998. Moreover,
53% of such institutions offered no benefits to part-time faculty. See
Mary Beth Marklein, "Part-time instructors march for better pay," USA
Today (October 30, 2001), p. 11D.

18. Critical educators have provided a rich
history of how both public and higher education has been shaped by the
politics, ideologies, and images of industry. For example, see Samuel Bowles
and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic
Books, 1976); Michael Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (New York:
Routledge, 1977); Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Schooling and Work
in the Democratic State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985);
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Still Under Siege
(Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1993); Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio,
The
Jobless Future (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994);
Cary Nelson, ed. Will Teach for Food (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997); D.W. Livingstone, The Education-Jobs Gap
(Boulder: Westview, 1998).

20. Richard Hoftstadter cited in Eyal
Press and Jennifer Washburn, "The Kept University," The Atlantic Monthly
(March 20, 2000), p. 54. Hofstadter expands on these views in The Development
and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (with C. De Witt
Hardy) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); The Development
of Academic Freedom in the United States (with Walter P. Metzger) (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1955); Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

27. Cited in Martin Van Der Werf, "A Vice-President
From the Business World Brings a New Bottom Line to Penn," The Chronicle
of Higher Education XLVI: 2 (September 3, 1999), p. A72.

28. Cited in Martin Van Der Werf, "A Vice-President
From the Business World Brings a New Bottom Line to Penn," The Chronicle
of Higher Education XLVI: 2 (September 3, 1999), p. A73.

29. Cited in Martin Van Der Werf, "A Vice-President
From the Business World Brings a New Bottom Line to Penn," The Chronicle
of Higher Education XLVI: 2 (September 3, 1999), p. A73.

30. Cited in Martin Van Der Werf, "A Vice-President
From the Business World Brings a New Bottom Line to Penn," The Chronicle
of Higher Education XLVI: 2 (September 3, 1999), p. A73.

31. The many books extolling corporate CEOs
as a model for leadership in any field is too extensive to cite, but one
typical example can be found in Robert Heller, Roads to Success: Put
Into Practice the Best Business Ideas of Eight Leading Gurus (New York:
Dorling Kindersley, 2001).

32. Catherine. S. Manegold, "Study Says Schools
Must Stress Academics," The New York Times (Friday, September 23,
1998), p. A22. It is difficult to understand how any school system could
have subjected students to such a crude lesson in commercial pedagogy.

34. This is amply documented in Jeremy Rifkin,
The
End of Work (New York: G. Putnam Book, 1995); William Wolman and Anne
Colamosca, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal
of Work (Reading: Addison-Welsley Publishing, 1997); Stanley Aronowitz
and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994); The New York Times Report: The Downsizing
of America (New York: Times Books, 1996); Stanley Aronowitz and
Jonathan Cutler, Post-Work (New York: Routledge, 1998).

35. Ralph Nader, "Civil Society and Corporate
Responsibility," Speech given to the National Press Club and broadcast
on C-Span -2 on March 25, 1998.

48. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

49. Williams, Op. cit., p. 750.

50. There are a number of books that take
up the relationship between schooling and democracy, some of the more important
recent critical contributions include: Elizabeth A. Kelly, Education,
Democracy, & Public Knowledge (Boulder: Westview, 1995); Wilfred
Carr and Anthony Hartnett, Education and the Struggle for Democracy
(Philadelphia: Open University Press,1996); Henry A. Giroux, Border
Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Postmodern
Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Stanley
Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport,
CT.: Bergin and Garvey Press, 1993), and Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy and
the Politics of Hope (Boulder: Westview, 1997).

51. Vaclav Havel, "The State of the Republic,"
The
New York Review of Books (June 22, 1998), p. 45.

Henry Giroux is the Waterbury Chair Professor
in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. He
has published extensively and is on the editorial and advisory boards of
numerous national and international scholarly journals. His most recent
books are Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and Impure Acts: The Practical
Politics of Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2000).